Inside GE, Ecomagination is deemed a success, so much so that it has spawned a sister initiative (if you can spawn a sister) called Healthymagination, focused on profitably creating better health for more people. GE says that it expects Ecomagination product revenues to grow at twice the rate of GE’s overall revenue between now and 2015.

The trouble is, the payoff for GE’s shareholders have been disappointing. I didn’t realize just how disappointing until I put together this chart comparing GE’s stock-price performance to the S&P500 and to a couple of its conglomerate competitors, Siemens and United Technologies.

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has added a power efficiency metric, TPC-Energy, to its ongoing roundups of speedy transactional processing systems. Hewlett-Packard is the first participant to use the new TPC-Energy specification, submitting benchmark results of four of its systems.

“Energy is an increasing factor in the total cost of ownership” for many organisations, said Karl Huppler, chairman of the TPC. The new benchmark will allow an organisation to judge how energy efficient systems are, as judged by watts per performance.

A new report by the Green Scissors Campaign details some $200 billion worth of yearly US government subsidies that the coalition says are “wasteful to taxpayers, harmful to the environment and bad for consumers.” Green Scissors 2010 [PDF] covers four broad areas in which these subsidies occur– energy, agriculture and biofuels, infrastructure, and public lands.

British, American and Norwegian engineers are in a race to design and build the holy grail of wind turbines – giant, 10MW offshore machines twice the size and power of anything seen before – that could transform the global energy market because of their economies of scale.

A new WDM/PLATFORM report released today finds that transforming the Royal Bank of Scotland into the Green Investment Bank would kick start the green energy revolution. ?The research, by former Pricewaterhouse Coopers consultant, James Leaton, finds that it would bring 50,000 new green jobs a year, boost the UK economy, reduce the UK’s carbon emissions and improve international competitiveness – whilst not increasing the budget deficit.

The warming temperatures of the ocean are problematic for many species, but especially worrisome is the impact hotter water has on cornerstone species upon which many other marine animals rely. Usually we hear about changes in ocean temperature impacting coral reefs, but now scientists are finding that across the globe, phytoplankton — the food for zooplankton which is food for many other ocean species — is in decline, and that will have massive impacts for not just the marine food chain but ocean systems on the whole.

In 2007, the Sierra Club brought the state of Wisconsin to court over emissions from some state-run coal plants used to provide heat and power to some university buildings and a hospital (UW-Eau Claire, UW-La Crosse, UW-Oshkosh, UW-River Falls and Mendota Mental Health Institute). The Department of Natural Resources sided with the Sierra Club, and the state now has a choice between installing pollution-control equipment to greatly reduce emissions, reducing the use of coal by displacing part of it with other fuels, or simply eliminating the use of coal completely

“While electronic devices have greatly improved in many regards, such as in storage capacity, graphics, and overall performance, etc., they still have a weight hanging around their neck: they?re huge energy hogs. When it comes to energy efficiency, today?s computers, cell phones, and other gadgets are little better off than those from a decade ago, or more. The problem of power goes beyond being green and saving money. For electrical engineers, power has become the primary design constraint for future electronic devices. Without lowering power consumption, improvements made in other areas of electronic devices could be useless, simply because there isn?t enough power to support them.”

“Sustainable investments in Asia (ex Japan) could make a huge jump from approximately $20bn today to $4 trillion by 2015 according to research by Vontobel, the Swiss fund manager. Vontobel says it believes sustainability themes are being ?seriously undervalued? in a region undergoing a tremendous pace of change in environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. “

Waste from discarded electronics will rise dramatically in the developing world within a decade, with computer waste in India alone to grow by 500 percent from 2007 levels by 2020, a U.N. study released on Monday said.

I attended a Logica Analyst briefing earlier this week in Logica’s recently opened International Utilities Competence Center (pictured above).

The days was chock full of talks from both Logica staff and also from João Torres, President & CEO EDP Distribuição – the Portuguese DSO, and a Logica customer.

Most of the talks were very interesting but two that stood out for me were the ones given by João Torres where he discussed EDP’s smart grid project, called InovGrid and the demo of RMS (Renewables Management System) by Jose Antunes and Rita Burnay. RMS is Logica’s software for managing remote windfarms.

In discussing InovGrid João explained that despite the costs of rolling out a smart grid, EDP felt that the benefits outweighed the costs. The main benefits João saw from smart grids were:

increase intelligence, supervision and control of the network

improve the efficiency and quality of the electricity supply

facilitate the maximising the amount of micro and distributed generation on the grid

enable smart metering and smart energy management

InovGrid is one of the most advanced smart grid projects in Europe. EDP now has 3,000 micro-generators on its grid and expects to have 200,000 smart meters installed by the end of 2010.

João was extremely open during his presentation. When asked which communication protocol was best for a smart grid, he said he felt PLC was best but he admitted that it had issues. EDP, he said, have a team assessing protocols and that a lot of the details are still to be decided.

Jose Antunes and Rita Burnay gave a demonstration of Logica’s windfarm management software RMS. The software is designed to manage large numbers of remote wind turbines and allows for quick and easy drill down on information. In the demo, we were shown RMS’s live feed from over 2,000 wind turbines all over the Iberian peninsula. The software collects and stores 300-400 data points from each turbine in realtime simultaneously.

As Jose said, wind turbines typically cost in the order of €1m per MW so one of the main functions of RMS is to minimise downtime of turbines. However, because it also stores all the historical data for turbines, it is able to plot performance of each turbine against the manufacturers SLA’s. I can see this being a popular screen!

Jose also told us that Logica are taking over the management of all of EDP’s wind turbines in Europe and the America’s. This will mean they will increase the current portfolio they are managing from 2GW to 10GW (though I don’t imagine all 10GW will be under one instance of RMS!

Logica’s Chris Beard gave a fascinating talk on a new Logica offering called Smart Office but I’ll come back to that in a separate post.

Above is the video from today’s GreenMonk Energy and Sustainability show and below is the chat-stream from the show:

04:31 Tom Raftery: Can you see/hear me?
04:32 Jason Roe: yea
04:32 abby: both audible and visible, tom!
04:33 TolkienLibrary: back – o started – nice
04:34 Tom Raftery: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html
04:36 Tom Raftery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M_XbeXDNnM
04:38 Tom Raftery: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE54O1I920090525?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
04:38 TolkienLibrary: well if you look who he works for… then i understand his point of view (the bastards)
04:39 Jason Roe: could be getting old too 😛 bit grumpy etc..
04:40 Tom Raftery: http://www.physorg.com/news162454033.html
04:41 mikethebee: This was discussed on RTE Pat Kenny today
04:41 TolkienLibrary: o nasty! guess US and Asia got some cleaning up to do
04:42 Tom Raftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/24/steven-chu-environmentalist-anger
04:44 Tom Raftery: http://www.physorg.com/news162457392.html
04:46 Tom Raftery: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009905.html
04:46 TolkienLibrary: US voted for CHANGE now they got OBAMA LIGHT (typical American I guess)
04:48 Tom Raftery: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldWithoutOzone/page1.php
04:50 Tom Raftery: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE54O16R20090525?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
04:53 Tom Raftery: http://www.mywindpowersystem.com/2009/05/the-most-amazing-wind-turbines-designs/
04:55 TolkienLibrary: yes saw that earlier today. Loved some of those ideas. The balloon idea would be nice // always people complaining about the sight
04:56 TolkienLibrary: sounds great…
04:56 Tom Raftery: http://blogs.zdnet.com/sustainability/?p=410
04:57 mikethebee: Do you know what types C&F in Irleand are intending to produce after recent annoucement?
04:59 Tom Raftery: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/halo/index.html
05:00 mikethebee: C&F (If I recall correctly) a wind turbine producer announced a major ramp up of production. Anyone know more?
05:03 TolkienLibrary: what do you think of solar panels in orbit announced by Solaren? http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/solaren-corp-to-launch-solar-panels-into-orbit/
05:06 mikethebee: I hadn’t heard of them til then, I wil research it more thx
05:06 TolkienLibrary: thanks for your opinion… also think it very expensive and ‘un-green’ to shoot solar panels up // they should concentrate on solar panels down here first
05:07 Tom Raftery: Thanks everyone for joining in and your contributions
05:07 TolkienLibrary: thnxs once again Tom… great show!
05:07 mikethebee: Thx Tom, gr8 show and content.
05:08 mikethebee: I always lose the last few seconds of the show for some reason.

A couple of interesting announcements were made in Ireland in the last week.

On the 8th of Oct., Eirgrid, the Irish grid operator launched their Grid25 strategy (pdf warning). In the strategy document they announced they are spending €4 billion reinforcing the Irish distribution grid in the expectation of a 60% rise in electricity usage.

The Irish Environment Minister, John Gormley in his Carbon Budget announced that the Irish government is going to target that 40% of electricity consumed in Ireland would be from renewable sources by 2020. This is an increase over the previously stated, already ambitious target, of 33% from renewables.

Ireland had an average electrical demand of 3.2GW in 2007. A 60% increase means an average consumption of 5GW by 2025 and an average of 4.5GW in 2020. This is the date the government has set as its target of 40% from renewables.

40% of 4.5GW means that Ireland will average 1.8GW from renewables in 2020. Assuming that this will come from wind (there is no other viable renewable energy source in Ireland), this will require 5.4GW of installed wind capacity.

Ireland currently has 1GW of installed wind capacity so to hit the target it needs 4.4GW of wind farms to be built.

That’s 366MW per annum or just over 1MW every day until 2020! A 1MW wind turbine would be a significant structure costing in excess of €1m.

So the Irish government has set as a target the sourcing of 1MW extra from wind energy every day for the next 12 years?

I also spotted today that StrategyEye in their new quarterly report are reporting that investment in the Cleantech sector is up 50% this quarter, compared to the first quarter of 2008.

The financial markets might be in trouble but renewables are definitely seeing boom times!